The Road Ahead - The Political Geography of Inequality - page 48

selection, it is important to establish that the claims about the origins of fiscal
structures made in this topic assume that the process of state formation is com-
plete, that is, locked in by a set of broadly accepted constitutional provisions,
well before contentions about the design of fiscal structures unfold. Note that
this does not necessarily imply that unions do not alter their size over time.
What it means, though, is that the decision to form the union in the first place,
and the procedures ruling contentions within the union, were adopted before
the emergence of political conflicts over fiscal structures. Moreover, the reasons
why the union was initially formed ought to be independent of the subsequent
distributive conflicts over the design of its fiscal structures. This qualification
is of particular importance for one of the cases of interest in this topic, the
European Union, to which I shall return.
A cursory overview of the geopolitical conditions surrounding the forma-
tion of these five unions suggests that none of them was originally formed in
response to distributional concerns among potential members. This is not to
say that distributional contentions did not matter subsequently for the spe-
cific arrangements ultimately made. They were actually rather important, for
instance, during the drafting and ratification of the US Constitution (Beard
1913; Beramendi and Wibbels 2010 ; McGuire 2003 ; Wibbels 2005a ). But the
decision to form these unions in the first place was not driven by distribu-
tional concerns nor because its members shared common economic interests, a
form of the “reductionist fallacy” ably denounced by Riker ( 1964 : 15). Rather,
geopolitical motives and the need of protection against a foreign enemy drove
the process. Put simply, geopolitics explains whether the union is pursued or
not; distributive conflicts help explain, I argue, how the union is ultimately
organized, and how it evolved.
Building on the American experience, Riker famously pointed to the presence
of an external threat as the key reason behind the formation of federations.
Facing either exploitation from or war against the British Empire, the colonies
faced a choice between integration and defeat. And they chose the former,
thus confirming Riker's necessary conditions for the federal bargain to occur.
First, a set of political elites want to expand their territorial control to meet
a military or diplomatic threat. They, however, do not want to do it manu
militari , but rather through a bargain with other territories, which leads to a
second condition; that the politicians that accept the bargain and give up some
power do so because of some external military threat as well. They either want
protection or a share in the rewards from the aggression by the larger unit (Riker
1964 : 11-14). The formation of the United States in turn triggered a process
out of which Canada itself emerged. Indeed, the formation of Canada is best
understood in terms of the geopolitical dynamics that unfolded between the
Treaty of Paris (1783), in which the borders between Canada and the United
States are recognized for the first time, the 1812 war between Britain and
the United States, in which Canadian provinces were used either as pawns or
bargaining chips, (thus acquiring awareness of the need to become a larger and
stronger political entity), and the formal establishment of the confederation